Communitarianism

Communitarians argue that individuals are not self-sufficient choosers who exist prior to society, but are formed by the communities — families, traditions, localities, nations — in which they live. A good political order therefore cannot be neutral about the good life or rest on rights alone; it must also cultivate shared meanings, civic virtue and responsibilities, and protect the communal institutions that make individual freedom possible. In nineteenth-century usage 'communitarian' described those who experimented with communal living, such as Owenites and Fourierists; the modern school is a different, largely philosophical and policy movement.

The philosophical critique of liberalism

Modern communitarianism arose as a critical reaction to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). Its main figures — Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981), Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982), Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice, 1983) — drew mainly on Aristotle and Hegel, and did not call themselves communitarians; the label was applied by others. They made three main arguments:

• The self. Rawlsian liberalism, Sandel argued, presupposes a self that can stand back from all its ends — what he later called the 'unencumbered self' (1984). He observed that we often understand ourselves 'as members of this family or community or nation or people', and that some attachments are constitutive rather than chosen. Taylor objected to the view that people are self-sufficient outside society.
• Universalism. MacIntyre and Walzer argued that standards of justice and virtue are rooted in particular traditions and shared understandings, so abstract universal principles misdescribe moral reasoning. Walzer proposed that different goods — health care, office, money, love — have different distributive criteria within a community.
• Social goods. Taylor argued that some goods, such as a language or a culture, are irreducibly social and cannot be secured by individual rights alone.

Liberals replied that the key value is the capacity to revise one's ends, not choosing them from nowhere, and Rawls's Political Liberalism recast his theory as a political conception for a pluralist society. By the early 1990s the debate about the self had largely faded.

Political communitarianism

In the 1990s Amitai Etzioni, William Galston and others launched a 'responsive communitarian' movement focused on policy. They argued that the welfare state, free markets and a rights-heavy culture had weakened family and local ties, and called for a better balance between rights and responsibilities. Their journal The Responsive Community and a 1991 platform proposed measures such as national service, support for two-parent families, character education, community policing and limits on some privacy and speech claims where public safety was at stake. Communitarians identified communities of place, of memory and face-to-face psychological communities as worth protecting.

East Asian communitarianism

A separate debate concerns 'Asian values'. Scholars distinguish government rhetoric — used to justify restrictions on rights — from considered arguments, such as Daniel A. Bell's, that cultural context shapes how rights are prioritised and can support distinctive institutions, including Confucian-inspired meritocratic chambers.

• Third Way politics. Communitarian themes of rights and responsibilities informed Bill Clinton's and Tony Blair's governments in the 1990s, including welfare-to-work conditions and community safety initiatives.
• 'Big Society'. The UK Conservative-led government after 2010 promoted the 'Big Society', devolving services to community and voluntary organisations, an idea critics saw as cover for spending cuts.
• Singapore. The 1991 White Paper on Shared Values placed 'nation before community and society above self', an official communitarianism criticised for legitimising restrictions on political freedoms.
• Community institutions. Community land trusts, neighbourhood councils, local currencies and co-operatives are often justified in communitarian terms as ways to rebuild local solidarity.
• Subsidiarity. Catholic social teaching and the European Union's principle of subsidiarity share the communitarian preference for decisions at the lowest effective level.

• Conservatism and conformity. Critics argue that communitarianism idealises communities that have historically been hierarchical, patriarchal or exclusionary; Elizabeth Frazer argued that 'community' has been used to justify hierarchy and delegitimise conflict.
• Which community? Modern individuals belong to many overlapping communities with conflicting demands; communitarianism gives little guidance on resolving those conflicts or on protecting dissenters within communities.
• Nostalgia. MacIntyre's ideal of a pre-modern, all-encompassing community seems ill-suited to large, industrial, plural societies.
• Relativism. Grounding justice in shared understandings risks endorsing unjust practices that a community happens to accept; Walzer's example of the Indian caste system was widely criticised.
• Policy vagueness. Political communitarianism has been criticised as a set of moral exhortations, easily appropriated by governments to shift responsibility for social problems onto families and volunteers.

As a philosophical movement communitarianism changed liberalism more than it replaced it: Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Will Kymlicka and others incorporated concerns about community, culture and civic virtue, and debates about multiculturalism, nationalism and civic education carry communitarian arguments forward. As a political programme its influence was diffuse — absorbed into Third Way and centre-right agendas — and its record is mixed: community-based policing and local devolution produced some successes, while 'responsibility' rhetoric was also used to justify welfare conditionality and cuts.

For governance design the communitarian legacy is a reminder that institutions depend on social capital and shared identities they do not themselves create, and that formal rules imported without regard to local meanings often fail. Its limits lie in protecting individuals and minorities against their own communities, which liberals argue requires rights that communities cannot override.

• Daniel Bell, 'Communitarianism', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981)
• Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982)
• Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (1983)
• Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community (1993)